Google Has Bought the Entire .app Domain for $25 Million

Google has been on a what could be termed as a shopping spree (in the world of mega organizations) lately. They have been buying startups, apps, and now entire web domains.

ICANN, the body that controls the world domains has been expanding the top level domains (TLDs) since a couple of years. With this, the search engine giant has been purchasing numerous generic ones as gradually as ICANN auctions them.

The auctioning processes have been in the works since June last year and they applied for over a hundred of them. The latest purchase that Google has made is for the .app domain.

As you can see from the latest gTLD auction results that were shared online recently, the domain that got the highest bid is .app and the winning bid was made by Charleston Road Registry Inc.

For those of you who aren’t sure, Charleston Road Registry Inc. is actually a company wholly owned by Google, its sole purpose is to manage registry services for the public.

So yes, the search engine giant who actually is a registrar, spent exactly $25,001,000 to purchase the entire domain. Among countless other things, this should show you how much they are interested in the search shift towards mobile.

Some of the other domains that they applied for include the ones like .docs, .android, .free, .fyi and .foo. They also bid for .tech but they were beaten out by Dot Tech LLC who bought it for $6.7 million.

Just to give you an idea of how much they have spent on the .app domain, compare it with the $5 million Amazon spent of purchasing .buy or the $2.2 million they spent on .spot.

Naturally, the .app domain has a much larger potential and seeing how people are focusing more on mobile, it could become a key player soon.